In the months since then, players have been holding out hope that the RSP was still in the works as a post-launch addition to the game. But in a Reddit thread posted earlier this week, DICE Community Manager Dan Mitre said, "You haven't seen an update in our direction with RSP because we haven't made a full decision internally whether or not we can deliver it."

He expanded on the difficulties surrounding the Rent-a-Server rollout this time around:

RSP needs to meet standards and your expectations with the tools we provide—that takes development resources. It also needs to make economical development sense —we can't introduce a feature that ends up costing more to keep maintained than it returns (I know that statement will open up more debate, and I encourage that, but this is the reality of the situation).

In other words, we don't want to impact development resources of main game Quality of Life commitment and upcoming content by routing team bandwidth to RSP development. There's also financial implications here that go well beyond my remit. Let's tackle the former before we tackle the latter.

Mitre's talk of recouping costs and "financial implications" is of particular interest considering that Battlefield V's sales have reportedly been well below expectations. The game saw deep retail discounts just one month after launch and suffered a severe dip in retail sales in the UK compared to Battlefield 1. It's quite possible, given Mitre's statement, that there's just not enough of a player base to make an RSP program profitable for Battlefield V.

Further Reading

That said, Mitre was quick to emphasize that such an RSP is not completely off the table for Battlefield V. "Our teams need to weigh this carefully and either commit fully to the service or not provide it at all—and you need an official statement on what that decision is once it's been made."

While you wait for that announcement, if you're looking instead to play some classic Battlefield games on player-run servers, here's a reminder that EA isn't allowing that either these days.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

120 Reader Comments

EA have made a number of mistakes with BFV but at it's heart it's actually a really good FPS.

Failing to support it properly and letting down the people who did buy it, still play it and still enjoy it would be another mistake and probably the most short-sighted.

'That's business' I'm sure I'll be told. 'EA are there to make money' but there's a lot of choice out there and if they keep letting down the people buying their products, consumers will go elsewhere.

Ubisoft could have done the same with Rainbow Six: Siege - middling reviews and a negative reaction from their fanbase when it came out, but Ubi doubled down on it instead of cutting it off at the knees and look how that turned out for them. They've even stuck with For Honor. Say what you like about them, but at least you can be fairly sure in future that they'll support the game you're buying.

Smaller developers seem able to support and improve games for years on a fraction of the sales that Battlefield V must have done, even if those numbers were 'below expectations'.

If EA decide to write BF:V off as a bad job and leave it to wither (and I reckon that's exactly what will happen) then hopefully all their customers will think twice before buying another game from them and look elsewhere instead.

The problem here is that Battlefield has significant in game issues which RSPs back in Battlefield 4 era were able to fix. You could have mods on the server who could ban cheaters, ban trolls, ban racists, limit ping, remove overpowered weapons, create specialty game modes...

That all went away with BF1, so I agree with DICE there is no reason to have RSPs like Battlefield 1, but there is every reason to have RSPs like in Battlefield 4.

In BFV Fairfight is not effective, the game has terrible issues with lag and does not limit ping, the chat censoring is a pathetic band aid.

RSPs that would let servers be policed by an admin and do special game modes would make BFV a lot more fun and enjoyable. So much so that I might actually buy it, or keep the Origin subscription active.

And yet the RSPs in Battlefield 4 meant you could get community banned from something like 1/3 of all game servers without ever doing anything that was against the game rules. I have a friend who was banned for zero seconds by PunkBuster for having Cheat Engine running. That meant he was kicked and could rejoin. Cheat Engine was actually for a single player game, and he accidentally left it running. PunkBuster didn't detect any game injection, hence whey it was a simple game kick instead of an actual ban with length. But the community server scrapped the PunkBuster kick and automatically added his player ID to a community ban list that was shared. As a consequence he was permanently banned from any community server running this shared list, which equated to about 1/3 of the servers. He tried rejoining BF4 a year later, and was still on the ban list.

What recourse do you have in this situation? And as more official servers get turned off, the number of community servers increase by proportion.

I got banned in BF1 and I wasn't running cheat engine in the background or any cheat, and yet the statistics based cheat detection of Fairfight hit me with a 7 day ban after a fun day of carpet bombing people, and EA would not tell me specifically what caused it. I'm guessing because the Heavy Bomber is too good.

Any system is going to have issues. I would rather be in your friends position. Now when I play BF1, I get to worry I'll get banned again if I do too well, and this time it will be for a lot longer. Your friend knows exactly why he was banned, and can buy a new account to play on those RSPs.

Or he could start his own RSP, with his own rules.

When community servers can ban at will and share ban lists, you are at the mercy of the least tolerant server admin with no due process and no appeal. When you are banned by EA, you actually have a semblance of consumer rights.

In BF4 you could be banned by EA, or banned by the community. EA has always had the ban hammer. What they did in BF5 seems to be taking the ban hammer away from the community.

Which puts EA in charge of enforcement which they are absolutely terrible at! I'd rather have RSPs banning people unfairly then being forced to report and wait around for days for EA to do something about it!

Especially since that unfair banning is only for private servers, and only those that share a ban list, meaning they can still play the game.

Your argument seems to be that player's policing other players might be bad at it, except I can tell you that EA is terrible at it! Moderators cannot do worse than EA is doing now.

The problem here is that Battlefield has significant in game issues which RSPs back in Battlefield 4 era were able to fix. You could have mods on the server who could ban cheaters, ban trolls, ban racists, limit ping, remove overpowered weapons, create specialty game modes...

That all went away with BF1, so I agree with DICE there is no reason to have RSPs like Battlefield 1, but there is every reason to have RSPs like in Battlefield 4.

In BFV Fairfight is not effective, the game has terrible issues with lag and does not limit ping, the chat censoring is a pathetic band aid.

RSPs that would let servers be policed by an admin and do special game modes would make BFV a lot more fun and enjoyable. So much so that I might actually buy it, or keep the Origin subscription active.

And yet the RSPs in Battlefield 4 meant you could get community banned from something like 1/3 of all game servers without ever doing anything that was against the game rules. I have a friend who was banned for zero seconds by PunkBuster for having Cheat Engine running. That meant he was kicked and could rejoin. Cheat Engine was actually for a single player game, and he accidentally left it running. PunkBuster didn't detect any game injection, hence whey it was a simple game kick instead of an actual ban with length. But the community server scrapped the PunkBuster kick and automatically added his player ID to a community ban list that was shared. As a consequence he was permanently banned from any community server running this shared list, which equated to about 1/3 of the servers. He tried rejoining BF4 a year later, and was still on the ban list.

What recourse do you have in this situation? And as more official servers get turned off, the number of community servers increase by proportion.

I got banned in BF1 and I wasn't running cheat engine in the background or any cheat, and yet the statistics based cheat detection of Fairfight hit me with a 7 day ban after a fun day of carpet bombing people, and EA would not tell me specifically what caused it. I'm guessing because the Heavy Bomber is too good.

Any system is going to have issues. I would rather be in your friends position. Now when I play BF1, I get to worry I'll get banned again if I do too well, and this time it will be for a lot longer. Your friend knows exactly why he was banned, and can buy a new account to play on those RSPs.

Or he could start his own RSP, with his own rules.

When community servers can ban at will and share ban lists, you are at the mercy of the least tolerant server admin with no due process and no appeal. When you are banned by EA, you actually have a semblance of consumer rights.

In BF4 you could be banned by EA, or banned by the community. EA has always had the ban hammer. What they did in BF5 seems to be taking the ban hammer away from the community.

Which puts EA in charge of enforcement which they are absolutely terrible at! I'd rather have RSPs banning people unfairly then being forced to report and wait around for days for EA to do something about it!

Especially since that unfair banning is only for private servers, and only those that share a ban list, meaning they can still play the game.

Your argument seems to be that player's policing other players might be bad at it, except I can tell you that EA is terrible at it! Moderators cannot do worse than EA is doing now.

So you would rather have unfair bans with no due process. But bans by the publisher which can be appealed and you have consumer rights, don't want those.

I’ve played BF franchise since the very beginning. I can tell you the poor sales and lack of a dedicated server client are not unrelated. The core BF crowd has rejected the new UI and delivery model, impacting their sales directly.

DICE bailed on their core playership in favor of chasing the Call of Duty dragon, but failed to understand how anethema that gameplay is to their core player base.

So it's lacking features present in Quake, a game released more than 20 goddamn years ago...

Progress!

Well when it's a dumpster fire of a game so bad it halved it's price as soon as legally allowed. ( People were too busy dogpileing FO76.) Games already on life support thanks to the previous release shitshow and not finishing the game before the release date. Ffs you couldn't even make your King Tiger breast cancer awareness pink! Absolutely game breaking!

I’ve played BF franchise since the very beginning. I can tell you the poor sales and lack of a dedicated server client are not unrelated. The core BF crowd has rejected the new UI and delivery model, impacting their sales directly.

DICE bailed on their core playership in favor of chasing the Call of Duty dragon, but failed to understand how anethema that gameplay is to their core player base.

I had BF1 bought for me. And I honestly don't care for the direction the game has gone since Hardline. It just doesn't feel like battlefield anymore.

I'm glad that EA is receiving less and less revenue. They seem to have learned how toxic lootboxes are from Battlefront 2 so they are gone from Battlefield 5. Its a good and fun game most of the time but the cheaters are rampant, just like in Battlefront 2. I'll mirror the opinions and say that custom servers and decent moderation will fix that.

Although I will point out one good thing. Their alt-history single player discouraged a bunch of toxic players from buying and shitting up the servers with their chatbox spam. I'd keep that in future releases.

All of my Battlefield memories (and they are many) come from back in the days when it was a given you'd be playing on a custom clan server or *gasp* using some awesome conversion mod. In my head I always still associate Battlefield with being a pretty hardcore PC game, the likes of Counter-Strike or such, and it completely floors me to read current articles and realize that you can't mod it and you can't run your own servers.

The problem here is that Battlefield has significant in game issues which RSPs back in Battlefield 4 era were able to fix. You could have mods on the server who could ban cheaters, ban trolls, ban racists, limit ping, remove overpowered weapons, create specialty game modes...

That all went away with BF1, so I agree with DICE there is no reason to have RSPs like Battlefield 1, but there is every reason to have RSPs like in Battlefield 4.

In BFV Fairfight is not effective, the game has terrible issues with lag and does not limit ping, the chat censoring is a pathetic band aid.

RSPs that would let servers be policed by an admin and do special game modes would make BFV a lot more fun and enjoyable. So much so that I might actually buy it, or keep the Origin subscription active.

And yet the RSPs in Battlefield 4 meant you could get community banned from something like 1/3 of all game servers without ever doing anything that was against the game rules. I have a friend who was banned for zero seconds by PunkBuster for having Cheat Engine running. That meant he was kicked and could rejoin. Cheat Engine was actually for a single player game, and he accidentally left it running. PunkBuster didn't detect any game injection, hence whey it was a simple game kick instead of an actual ban with length. But the community server scrapped the PunkBuster kick and automatically added his player ID to a community ban list that was shared. As a consequence he was permanently banned from any community server running this shared list, which equated to about 1/3 of the servers. He tried rejoining BF4 a year later, and was still on the ban list.

What recourse do you have in this situation? And as more official servers get turned off, the number of community servers increase by proportion.

I got banned in BF1 and I wasn't running cheat engine in the background or any cheat, and yet the statistics based cheat detection of Fairfight hit me with a 7 day ban after a fun day of carpet bombing people, and EA would not tell me specifically what caused it. I'm guessing because the Heavy Bomber is too good.

Any system is going to have issues. I would rather be in your friends position. Now when I play BF1, I get to worry I'll get banned again if I do too well, and this time it will be for a lot longer. Your friend knows exactly why he was banned, and can buy a new account to play on those RSPs.

Or he could start his own RSP, with his own rules.

When community servers can ban at will and share ban lists, you are at the mercy of the least tolerant server admin with no due process and no appeal. When you are banned by EA, you actually have a semblance of consumer rights.

In BF4 you could be banned by EA, or banned by the community. EA has always had the ban hammer. What they did in BF5 seems to be taking the ban hammer away from the community.

Which puts EA in charge of enforcement which they are absolutely terrible at! I'd rather have RSPs banning people unfairly then being forced to report and wait around for days for EA to do something about it!...

I'd just like to share that all major devs that have online games also have extensive reporting and logging. 99% of the time when someone claims "I got banned for no reason" the dev comes back with receipts proving that they were in fact being an asshole. This is really important these days considering how interconnected everyone is community outrage can get out of hand quickly.

The best part was when someone was being a dick you just stood up and slapped him. I also remember that old video from some huge counter strike LAN party and a dude got caught cheating. No nastygram e-mail or slap on the wrist, they threw his computer into the parking lot and left it as salvage for whatever didn't break. There's no cheater justice better than teaching a $2,000 lesson.

Every time I see articles about "Game company X doing Y to combat toxicity in multiplayer for game Z" I always remember how this wasn't an issue back in the days of self-hosted servers and no matchmaking, since if people were being toxic you could just make your own server or join one with a ruleset you enjoyed.

Yeah, since everyone's lumped into the same leaderboard for all the cheaters to hack and pretend like it means something, they can't do anything like that. After all, they're not the ones claiming to be a Player-First company.

Would it really be so impossible to sell the server binary to people who want to run their own servers? Charge like $50 for the server with no support and let people host it on their own resources.

I would suggest open sourcing the server, but I'm pretty sure that would cause head to explode over at EA. At least if there is the possibility of making money on it you might get some suits on board, especially if there are no ongoing expenses after the fact.

Open sourcing is a nice dream, but for this to work EA would need to own the vast majority of the IP in their server side stack, which they almost certainly won't. There is likely a ton of licenced commercial middle-ware/third party code dependencies, much like in most large scale commercial software endeavors. Strangely enough, these third parties may not necessarily want the source code (or even a compiled artifact) from their labors shared for free.

To open source, EA would very likely need these technology partners to agree. It can also artificially limit their future agility, as now any future commercial technology they want to use may be off limits due to their commitment to their open source project. Go open source and you typically have to ensure all your (often many) dependencies have compatible licensing.

I'd of course love for these things to be open source so the community can keep these games alive long beyond their commercial lifespans, but there are some simple realities of doing commercial software that will likely get in the way for some time for many games.

Closed source binaries for cash like your $50 example? That could work, assuming they are happy with the increased surface area for serverside cheats/exploits. I'd have some concerns over whether this would generate enough revenue to justify the support and sustaining costs though, I suspect the vast majority of players would never run this. Just a single software engineer at EA in LA, as an example, can easily cost in excess of $100,000/yr in today's job market. You would need at least a small team of them working on user raised bugs alone to deliver this at a level of quality customers expect from a company the size of EA. For sure average engineer salaries are lower internationally, but this still wouldn't be cheap.

It seems crazy to me that a game that seemingly undersold can't figure out how to rent servers to increase the revenue of the game.

How meager are the profit margins on the server rental if it's suddenly not viable? Do they project so much fewer rentals that they get a lower bulk rate to rent out the servers? Just pass the costs on to the consumer like they do on literally everything else. Do whatever you can to grow the fanbase to pull this game out of a nosedive.

I assume development cost is a big part of it and that is greatly impacted by how many people might use a rental server. The cost to develop the servers is pretty much fixed so if that is spread out over 1000 customers or 25000 customers is a significant issue.

It’s unlikely the reality of pricing economics allows them to successfully establish it at any given size.

The best part was when someone was being a dick you just stood up and slapped him. I also remember that old video from some huge counter strike LAN party and a dude got caught cheating. No nastygram e-mail or slap on the wrist, they threw his computer into the parking lot and left it as salvage for whatever didn't break. There's no cheater justice better than teaching a $2,000 lesson.

The problem here is that Battlefield has significant in game issues which RSPs back in Battlefield 4 era were able to fix. You could have mods on the server who could ban cheaters, ban trolls, ban racists, limit ping, remove overpowered weapons, create specialty game modes...

That all went away with BF1, so I agree with DICE there is no reason to have RSPs like Battlefield 1, but there is every reason to have RSPs like in Battlefield 4.

In BFV Fairfight is not effective, the game has terrible issues with lag and does not limit ping, the chat censoring is a pathetic band aid.

RSPs that would let servers be policed by an admin and do special game modes would make BFV a lot more fun and enjoyable. So much so that I might actually buy it, or keep the Origin subscription active.

And yet the RSPs in Battlefield 4 meant you could get community banned from something like 1/3 of all game servers without ever doing anything that was against the game rules. I have a friend who was banned for zero seconds by PunkBuster for having Cheat Engine running. That meant he was kicked and could rejoin. Cheat Engine was actually for a single player game, and he accidentally left it running. PunkBuster didn't detect any game injection, hence whey it was a simple game kick instead of an actual ban with length. But the community server scrapped the PunkBuster kick and automatically added his player ID to a community ban list that was shared. As a consequence he was permanently banned from any community server running this shared list, which equated to about 1/3 of the servers. He tried rejoining BF4 a year later, and was still on the ban list.

What recourse do you have in this situation? And as more official servers get turned off, the number of community servers increase by proportion.

I got banned in BF1 and I wasn't running cheat engine in the background or any cheat, and yet the statistics based cheat detection of Fairfight hit me with a 7 day ban after a fun day of carpet bombing people, and EA would not tell me specifically what caused it. I'm guessing because the Heavy Bomber is too good.

Any system is going to have issues. I would rather be in your friends position. Now when I play BF1, I get to worry I'll get banned again if I do too well, and this time it will be for a lot longer. Your friend knows exactly why he was banned, and can buy a new account to play on those RSPs.

Or he could start his own RSP, with his own rules.

When community servers can ban at will and share ban lists, you are at the mercy of the least tolerant server admin with no due process and no appeal. When you are banned by EA, you actually have a semblance of consumer rights.

In BF4 you could be banned by EA, or banned by the community. EA has always had the ban hammer. What they did in BF5 seems to be taking the ban hammer away from the community.

Which puts EA in charge of enforcement which they are absolutely terrible at! I'd rather have RSPs banning people unfairly then being forced to report and wait around for days for EA to do something about it!...

I'd just like to share that all major devs that have online games also have extensive reporting and logging. 99% of the time when someone claims "I got banned for no reason" the dev comes back with receipts proving that they were in fact being an asshole. This is really important these days considering how interconnected everyone is community outrage can get out of hand quickly.

Haha not EA though. Repeated attempts with customer service to get them to explain why exactly I got a 7 day ban all they would do is point to a generic response about cheating, using banned programs, or supporting cheats.

Still not sure why I got banned as I wasn't cheating or had any background apps or cheat engine installed. I am guessing it was because I was going like 86-3 in the Bomber and Fairfight I heard works off statistics.

But as it is I play now worried about getting banned at any time for no apparent reason. Quality EA experience!

Count me among those disappointed by BFV. At least Rush is coming back soon, apparently, but as an extremely mediocre player with extremely limited patience for racist trolls and people who treat every game as a giant deathmatch, it's pretty frustrating.

Hardcore mode kept the riffraff away and forced everybody to actually play tactically and use teamwork, squad mechanics, etc. Custom rules meant I never had to get matched up with somebody with a username like "AspiringRacist" or listen to a bunch of mouthbreathers throw around the n-word. I understand the limitations from DICE's perspective, but this will probably be the last entry in the series I play if this is the new normal.

I think a legit hardcore mode would make this more appealing for a lot of long time BF fans.

I'm always dissapointed that more people don't play hardcore. I didn't know the newer ones lacked a HC mode.

Once custom servers came out for BF1 people tweaked HUD & damage/health settings to mimic HC mode. You couldn't filter by hardcore mode in the server browser though. The server had to have "hardcore" in the name, you had to do a name search, and the servers varied in their interpretation of what HC was. Ugh...

Playing softcore BFV where four headshots with an LMG won't take someone down but every sniper rifle is a one headshot kill just ruins it for me.

The problem here is that Battlefield has significant in game issues which RSPs back in Battlefield 4 era were able to fix. You could have mods on the server who could ban cheaters, ban trolls, ban racists, limit ping, remove overpowered weapons, create specialty game modes...

That all went away with BF1, so I agree with DICE there is no reason to have RSPs like Battlefield 1, but there is every reason to have RSPs like in Battlefield 4.

In BFV Fairfight is not effective, the game has terrible issues with lag and does not limit ping, the chat censoring is a pathetic band aid.

RSPs that would let servers be policed by an admin and do special game modes would make BFV a lot more fun and enjoyable. So much so that I might actually buy it, or keep the Origin subscription active.

And yet the RSPs in Battlefield 4 meant you could get community banned from something like 1/3 of all game servers without ever doing anything that was against the game rules. I have a friend who was banned for zero seconds by PunkBuster for having Cheat Engine running. That meant he was kicked and could rejoin. Cheat Engine was actually for a single player game, and he accidentally left it running. PunkBuster didn't detect any game injection, hence whey it was a simple game kick instead of an actual ban with length. But the community server scrapped the PunkBuster kick and automatically added his player ID to a community ban list that was shared. As a consequence he was permanently banned from any community server running this shared list, which equated to about 1/3 of the servers. He tried rejoining BF4 a year later, and was still on the ban list.

What recourse do you have in this situation? And as more official servers get turned off, the number of community servers increase by proportion.

I got banned in BF1 and I wasn't running cheat engine in the background or any cheat, and yet the statistics based cheat detection of Fairfight hit me with a 7 day ban after a fun day of carpet bombing people, and EA would not tell me specifically what caused it. I'm guessing because the Heavy Bomber is too good.

Any system is going to have issues. I would rather be in your friends position. Now when I play BF1, I get to worry I'll get banned again if I do too well, and this time it will be for a lot longer. Your friend knows exactly why he was banned, and can buy a new account to play on those RSPs.

Or he could start his own RSP, with his own rules.

When community servers can ban at will and share ban lists, you are at the mercy of the least tolerant server admin with no due process and no appeal. When you are banned by EA, you actually have a semblance of consumer rights.

In BF4 you could be banned by EA, or banned by the community. EA has always had the ban hammer. What they did in BF5 seems to be taking the ban hammer away from the community.

Which puts EA in charge of enforcement which they are absolutely terrible at! I'd rather have RSPs banning people unfairly then being forced to report and wait around for days for EA to do something about it!

Especially since that unfair banning is only for private servers, and only those that share a ban list, meaning they can still play the game.

Your argument seems to be that player's policing other players might be bad at it, except I can tell you that EA is terrible at it! Moderators cannot do worse than EA is doing now.

So you would rather have unfair bans with no due process. But bans by the publisher which can be appealed and you have consumer rights, don't want those.

You seem to have this idea of a fair and impartial process that is consumer oriented being done by EA. It's not. You just write a customer support ticket, some low level employee reads the ban code, copy paste the paragraph on the code, and sends it to you. I know this first hand.

I'd rather have RSPs with dictators imposing a harsh but understood rule, than the wild wild west of the EA servers where the sheriff shows up late and jails the wrong guy.

Say that the BFV server software runs some properietary code, which has a license per running instance (on the vein of say, Oracle database). They might be paying extra for each running instance more than just the cost of electricity on top of their server racks. This would also mean they can't give out a basic binary for enthusiasts to run their servers.

Don't underestimate the cost of porting software to a new distribution model. For example, I work with a Windows application that is installed at client sites. If my boss came to me and said, "turn this into a cloud-based (web) app that does the same thing" my first question would be how many new staff are in the budget. Because thing A exists doesn't make it easy to transform into thing A'.

Also, the other person who mentioned the complications of licensing and distributing dependencies hit another nail on the head. With a cloud (or hosted server) technologies, companies were able to sidestep some of the needs to distribute all the binary components to every player.

This is one of many problems with the shift from games as a buy-once-and-own model to a games as a service model. I'd hope they would at least allow player-owned non-ranked servers to be an option if RSP is not available, but knowing EA I'll assume they're never going to put players ahead of revenue streams.

It's a problem with software as a service in general. You're either paying forever to keep access to software you used to be able to just outright license once (Photoshop 6 and earlier) or you're not allowed to have more than what is essentially a dumb client.

In the game world, I don't really care for that aside from MMOs or purely multiplayer games, and outside of it usually you can find a good alternative to the 'big names' who're going to subscription-only. For example, you can get Affinity Photo for a $50 one-time payment which will do most of what most people need it to do vs. paying for Photoshop... and paying... and paying... and paying... and paying... forever.

Seems like in general you're better off going with smaller developers since it seems that the big names in any software niche eventually start deciding to extract monthly money or in some other way getting you to give up control.

How about you lot (and this goes for all gem developers/publishers) stop pushing peer based servers or connecting to you back end servers and let us bloody start hosting them ourselves from the get go instead? Don't waste the time on developing a system that is really really unwanted. I miss the days of real servers and the stronger friendships and crap that developed from it.

Even the rental services are silly. We should be able to roll out or own from the get go. I am sick and tired of the current system. Let us have control back in some fashion. Unless you are making an MMORPG, let us host or play locally (so we can do adhoc networks with hamachi if we want) there are a slew of just mind boggling decisions that are just aggravating anymore.

If someone is cheating and your system doesn't catch them what then? If we want a server where we can ban based off overuse of profanity etc. I know plenty of people that like to play these games with their kids and they just can't anymore because of how toxic it is and they can't make family friendly servers etc. It is just getting old at this point.

EA and Dice made many mistakes with BFV, the biggest IMO was focusing on a single player campaign that was never the focus of a main Battlefield game in the entire franchise.

The maps in the game half aren't that great and they get old quick for multiplayer and multiplayer in general feels unpolished. The game doesn't even auto balance teams anymore.

Putting everything under multiple different unlock systems I think was also a bad move, and a lot of the starter weapons feel like garbage which I think turns off players who feel like they can't compete with people who have way more unlocks.

The only thing that made player run servers great in the past was mods like Desert Combat, without mods like that then rent a server is already very limited and doesn't offer a whole lot.

Forget rental servers. Just give players the code to run their own servers on their own hardware, which used to be the stardard procedure for shooters from my day (UT99, Counter-Strike, Quake, etc). Not only did it allow us to create custom content (maps, weapons, game modes), but we also created far better tools to police our own servers. If someone was being an abusive ass, he got kicked and/or banned, no questions asked. Don't like the rules? Go to another server.

Amen, I miss the old days on my preferred server (ninjaserve). Always was full, always had good games, and people simply weren't allowed to be dicks. We were even able to have friendly fire on because people knew if you were a jerk and intentionally were wiping out your teammates you got perma-banned. Maybe we just got lucky but it seemed like there was always the perfect mix of personality types on too for the most part so nothing got out of hand.

Oddly everyone knew each other a lot better too. Seemed like the members of the community were closer to one another.

Sigh... I remember the good 'ol days. Remember when you could play Starcraft at LAN parties without having hit the Blizzard servers on the WAN? No internet access needed.

I remember the days when you could play Blizzard games at a Lan Party with one disc because all they cared about for multi-player was that one person had purchased it. If you wanted to play with your friend they were all about sharing as for good games that meant they would most likely buy the full copy.

The best part was when someone was being a dick you just stood up and slapped him. I also remember that old video from some huge counter strike LAN party and a dude got caught cheating. No nastygram e-mail or slap on the wrist, they threw his computer into the parking lot and left it as salvage for whatever didn't break. There's no cheater justice better than teaching a $2,000 lesson.

He could of easily sued them and pressed charges against them for destruction of property. Ask them politely to leave jesus christ.

I’ve played BF franchise since the very beginning. I can tell you the poor sales and lack of a dedicated server client are not unrelated. The core BF crowd has rejected the new UI and delivery model, impacting their sales directly.

DICE bailed on their core playership in favor of chasing the Call of Duty dragon, but failed to understand how anethema that gameplay is to their core player base.

Yup they've been losing people with every game since I'd say 3 trying to chase new players, without ever finding them in any notable numbers. If it's finally reached the point where the numbers aren't adding up any more for 'extra' features there's maybe a couple more games to come with ever dropping investment before EA quietly shelve the franchise and DICE become purely an engine development team to slowly wither away in the background.

Personally I was done with BF by the time I stopped playing 3, whilst the individual patches were up and down the overall trend was less and less fun for me, and every game since I've at best looked at and thought 'meh'.

Forget rental servers. Just give players the code to run their own servers on their own hardware, which used to be the stardard procedure for shooters from my day (UT99, Counter-Strike, Quake, etc). Not only did it allow us to create custom content (maps, weapons, game modes), but we also created far better tools to police our own servers. If someone was being an abusive ass, he got kicked and/or banned, no questions asked. Don't like the rules? Go to another server.

Aka why I still play TF2. I like joining my favourite community servers and playing with the same friendly regulars. 100% casual experience with no ranking or competitive crap forced on you (though it's there if you want it).

Plus, I'm 30 now. I just want to play the game for a couple of hours a week and pwn a few players. I have no interest in dedicating my entire spare time to ranking up or unlocking crates and skins or whatever the kids are obsessed with these days.

Forget rental servers. Just give players the code to run their own servers on their own hardware, which used to be the stardard procedure for shooters from my day (UT99, Counter-Strike, Quake, etc). Not only did it allow us to create custom content (maps, weapons, game modes), but we also created far better tools to police our own servers. If someone was being an abusive ass, he got kicked and/or banned, no questions asked. Don't like the rules? Go to another server.

Amen, I miss the old days on my preferred server (ninjaserve). Always was full, always had good games, and people simply weren't allowed to be dicks. We were even able to have friendly fire on because people knew if you were a jerk and intentionally were wiping out your teammates you got perma-banned. Maybe we just got lucky but it seemed like there was always the perfect mix of personality types on too for the most part so nothing got out of hand.

Oddly everyone knew each other a lot better too. Seemed like the members of the community were closer to one another.

Sigh... I remember the good 'ol days. Remember when you could play Starcraft at LAN parties without having hit the Blizzard servers on the WAN? No internet access needed.

I remember the days when you could play Blizzard games at a Lan Party with one disc because all they cared about for multi-player was that one person had purchased it. If you wanted to play with your friend they were all about sharing as for good games that meant they would most likely buy the full copy.

The best part was when someone was being a dick you just stood up and slapped him. I also remember that old video from some huge counter strike LAN party and a dude got caught cheating. No nastygram e-mail or slap on the wrist, they threw his computer into the parking lot and left it as salvage for whatever didn't break. There's no cheater justice better than teaching a $2,000 lesson.

He could of easily sued them and pressed charges against them for destruction of property. Ask them politely to leave jesus christ.

True, which is why I never personally went after anyone's property. Certainly didn't stop me from pelting someone with soda cans though. I miss LANs.

Can't introduce a feature that might cost more than it returns? EA were the ones who completely eliminated third-party server rentals starting with BF1. This is a mess of their own making. Solution? Go back to the way things were before BF1 and allow third-party server rentals. Problem solved. Ugh. I've put thousands of hours into the Battlefield franchise going all the back back to 1942 and I watched as communities fell apart due to the idiotic decisions made with BF1. It seems like they've learned very little with BFV. The best thing they did was to finally get rid of Premium, but then they continue to make decisions like these.

They didn't promise anything, no, but they provided them for the last two games and they were a popular feature with a core part of the audience. Killing them for financial reasons would be understandable but also disappointing.

Killing them would reduce their revenue. Many wouldn't play a game where they couldn't go to community servers.

Forget rental servers. Just give players the code to run their own servers on their own hardware, which used to be the stardard procedure for shooters from my day (UT99, Counter-Strike, Quake, etc). Not only did it allow us to create custom content (maps, weapons, game modes), but we also created far better tools to police our own servers. If someone was being an abusive ass, he got kicked and/or banned, no questions asked. Don't like the rules? Go to another server.

Battlefield allowed player run servers until Battlefield 3. I honestly will never purchase another BF game again. The last BF I played regularly was 4 and the last purchase was BF1. It was bad enough when they switched to rental servers, but I refuse to play without a server that my group has control of. Too many cheaters and assholes to play a shooter where they can't be kicked.

How did DICE turn Battlefield into a cash-strapped franchise? I always thought Battlefield was one of the "big" shooters with a reliable fan base.

I guess DICE has missed the perennial boat. FPS games seemed to have a renaissance with Overwatch, PUBG, and Fortnite.

None of those are FPS games.

BF had a style and execution that the player base enjoyed. EA/Dice decided to move away from that and now the franchise will slowly wither as the last of the cash is squeezed out of it. None of us should be surprised by such an action given EAs history with their acquisitions .

Hey Dice, how about you stop splitting your userbase because of DLC TIERS and then maybe you'll see a stronger battlefield base and devotion again to your dedicated server market. Also would help your sales figures to create what American gamers want and not what the Swedish government wants.

How did DICE turn Battlefield into a cash-strapped franchise? I always thought Battlefield was one of the "big" shooters with a reliable fan base.

I guess DICE has missed the perennial boat. FPS games seemed to have a renaissance with Overwatch, PUBG, and Fortnite.

None of those are FPS games.

BF had a style and execution that the player base enjoyed. EA/Dice decided to move away from that and now the franchise will slowly wither as the last of the cash is squeezed out of it. None of us should be surprised by such an action given EAs history with their acquisitions .

Hey Dice, how about you stop splitting your userbase because of DLC TIERS and then maybe you'll see a stronger battlefield base and devotion again to your dedicated server market. Also would help your sales figures to create what American gamers want and not what the Swedish government wants.

Hey Dice, how about you stop splitting your userbase because of DLC TIERS and then maybe you'll see a stronger battlefield base and devotion again to your dedicated server market. Also would help your sales figures to create what American gamers want and not what the Swedish government wants.

BFV has all future DLC included so... yeah, they did that.

Yeah...uhhhh...talking about prior BF games here, not the current. Thought you would have realized that since the article is about historical sales figures.